On September 15, 2001, I received an email from my close friend and Stanford classmate Valarie Kaur, an email that would launch us both into a whirlwind over the subsequent decade. When the terrorist attacks hit, I was far away from my California home, studying abroad at the Jesuit University in El Salvador. At school, Valarie and I had taken classes together, collaborated on projects and stayed up into the wee hours talking about our beliefs and ideas and what we wanted to do with our lives. She was the first person I knew who practiced Sikhism, the world’s fifth largest religion. She taught me that her faith shared many values in common with my own Catholic tradition: love, devotion to God, living a moral life, and practicing social justice.
Now, in an internet café thousands of miles away from home, I read a message from Valarie telling me that a Sikh man in Arizona had just been shot. His name was Balbir Singh Sodhi, he owned a gas station in Mesa, and someone drove up and shot him because he was wearing a turban on his head and they thought that made him a terrorist. Valarie’s family knew him.
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